Beneath Syria’s ministries and decrees lies a shadow economy controlled by the Sharaa brothers and a foreign-born operative, whose journey from Idlib militancy to the heart of Damascus exposes how power and profit intertwine in the post-Assad state.
Self-appointed Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa (formerly known as Abu Muhammad al-Julani when he was an Al-Qaeda chief) has issued decrees establishing a new lattice of economic bodies under his direct authority or under the “General Secretariat of the Presidency,” led by his brother Maher al-Sharaa.
These include the National Committee for Import and Export, the General Authority for Border Crossings and Customs, a sovereign fund, the Development Fund, and the General Authority for Civil Aviation. Some are reconstituted entities once belonging to ministries of transport, economy, or finance; others are inventions of the new order. All now feed power upward into the Sharaa family’s command structure.
On paper, the economy is supervised by Minister of Economy and Industry Mohamed Nidal al-Shaar, Minister of Finance Mohamed Yasar Barniyya, and Central Bank Governor Abdel Qader al-Hasriyya.
Yet businessmen, technocrats, and insiders who speak to The Cradle describe a system where these officials serve largely as clerical fronts. Decision-making lies in a “deep economic state” operated by the president’s brothers and enforced by an unexpected figure: Ibrahim Sukkarieh, known inside the system as Abu Maryam al-Australi.
The enforcer
The ascent of Sukkarieh – or “Abu Maryam the Australian,” born in Australia to a Lebanese father from Akkar and an Australian mother, and raised in Brisbane – has become one of the most revealing stories of Syria’s post-Assad transformation.
He arrived in Syria in 2013, at a moment of deep turmoil, and under circumstances that would only later become clear. He left Australia a day before his brother, Ahmed, carried out a suicide car-bomb attack in rural Damascus – an attack that made Ahmed the first known Australian suicide bomber.
Another brother, Omar, was sentenced to four and a half years in Australia in 2016 for financing the precursor to HTS, the Nusra Front, placing the family under intelligence scrutiny on both sides of the world.
In Idlib, Ibrahim first cultivated a profile as an English-speaking commentator, appearing on podcasts and social media to discuss the region’s governance. Using names such as “Ibrahim Massoud” and “Ibrahim bin Massoud,” he portrayed himself as a researcher and analyst, even identifying himself playfully on some platforms as a “businessman, cricket lover, shawarma lover.” Yet beneath this crafted persona lay a different story.
According to Syrian sources and multiple internal reports, Sukkarieh held military and organizational positions inside HTS, serving as a sector emir prior to 2020. In October 2022, he joined the group’s “general follow-up committee,” headed by Abd al-Rahim Attoun, the former HTS mufti who now directs the presidency’s “religious consultation office.”
Alongside these roles, Sukkarieh managed E-Clean, a hygiene company closely tied to the Idlib Salvation Government, placing him at the intersection of economic administration and HTS’s governing arm. He later assumed responsibility for the authority’s technology and communications file in October 2023, succeeding Abu Talha al-Halabi and expanding his reach within HTS’s bureaucratic networks.
Throughout these years, Australian authorities kept him on their sanctions list for terrorist financing – a designation Canberra continues to uphold, even as Sukkarieh shifted from insurgent circuits to an altogether more consequential sphere: the palace.
The shadow committee and the birth of a parallel economy
International reporting and leaked intelligence have since revealed that, following the collapse of the Assad government, Sukkarieh moved into a central role inside the presidential palace, working directly with the Syrian president's older brother, Hazem al-Sharaa, to restructure Syria’s economy.
Press investigations describe him as head of a “shadow committee” responsible for orchestrating the seizure of assets once held by Assad-era businessmen. According to sources familiar with its operations, the committee has taken control of an estimated $1.6 billion in property, investment portfolios, and telecom stakes, including roughly $1.5 billion linked to three powerful businessmen aligned with the former government.
According to the French publication Intelligence Online, Abu Maryam currently heads the presidential committee in a policy described by some sources as "forgiveness in exchange for money.”
Instead of judicial procedures, the committee relies on “settlements” – negotiations that leave the targeted businessman with a fraction of his holdings in exchange for cash payments, political loyalty, or both. Much of the recovered wealth has been transferred into a newly announced sovereign fund under presidential supervision.
The same French report notes that he previously held economic oversight roles within HTS structures and is currently involved in managing digital financial systems like Sham Cash.
Settlements, seizures, and threats
According to two businessmen – each of whom communicated personally with Abu Maryam al-Australi – who spoke with The Cradle, the first source, a well-known businessman who left Damascus after the government fell, says:
“Abu Maryam al-Australi called me and proposed a settlement in which I would relinquish 80 percent of my assets. After I refused, I was threatened with seizure of all my movable and immovable property. We later reached a formula requiring me to pay money to prevent the seizure. After I paid, they contacted me again months later and extorted me again. When I refused to pay, my assets were seized.”
He confirms that he reached out to Finance Minister Barniyya, an old friend, but the minister told him: “What is happening is not legal,” and that no law allows such a seizure – yet he has no authority to stop it. He explains that he spoke with Abu Maryam only once; afterward, someone from Abu Maryam’s office handled the rest. The first payment, he says, was made in cash because they refused to accept any bank transfer that might later serve as evidence.
The second businessman confirms that, under unrelenting pressure and continuous extortion, he was forced to surrender 80 percent of his assets, stressing that the pressure came directly from Abu Maryam in coordination with Hazem al-Sharaa.
A separate source tells The Cradle that Syrian businessman Samir Hassan – who was arrested in September by the transitional government's security services despite government promises that he would not be arrested following his settlement with Abu Maryam and Hazem al-Sharaa and his payment of the required amount—was nonetheless arrested in Damascus.
Also speaking to The Cradle, Syrian economist Mohammed Olabi says today that Syria's economy “is divided into three parallel systems: the state economy, the economy of the northwest based in Idlib, and the economy of eastern Euphrates,” explaining that each has “its own financial, customs, and operational structures,” making the economy, as he put it, “without a unified center” and making “any national policy hostage to parallel zones of influence outside the authority of a single state.”
Regarding ministerial and economic powers, Olabi said the current landscape “makes it difficult to say ministers possess real decision-making authority,” noting that “most economic decisions are made outside the ministerial framework,” drafted either “in the inner circle around the presidency or through unofficial economic committees that control investment files, banks, settlements, and even import/export decisions.”
Three parallel economies
Olabi notes that a minister “does not set policy as much as he executes directives,” and that his role is often “technical or media-related rather than one of decision-making.” Even the Syrian Central Bank – supposed to be the most independent – “operates under limits set by parallel power centres overseeing monetary policy and liquidity management.”
Economist Younes Karim describes a three-tiered hierarchy: the Presidential Secretariat under Maher al-Sharaa; the Supreme Economic Council under Hazem al-Sharaa; and the clerical-security networks of HTS figures whose influence is tolerated because it ensures loyalty.
He explains to The Cradle that Maher al-Sharaa “has become a key center of decision-making and the architect of economic policy,” because “every administrative or economic decision returns to him.” The second center of power is the “Supreme Economic Council” run by Hazem al-Sharaa, whose role has become “the replacement for the Economic Chamber” previously run de facto by the former first lady, Asma al-Assad.
Karim says the Secretariat has become “a parallel cabinet,” issuing decisions with the immediacy once associated with a prime minister or even a vice president. He describes an emerging duality: a “state of the poor,” represented by ministries, and a “supra-constitutional state,” made up of elite bodies linked to the Sharaa family.
Within this order, Sukkarieh runs the economic implementation wing, while Mustafa Kadeed – known as Abu Abdel Rahman – handles financial flows. He describes Hazem as the embodiment of the “shadow economy,” while Maher represents the “official economy.”
Karim warns of “the collapse of the concept of the state,” the “erasure of Syria’s institutional identity,” and the “imminent clash” between competing centers of power. “The struggle has begun,” he says. “Each faction is defining its space. The clash is coming.”
Inside the new power network
The architecture of authority in Syria today is built around a single extended family and the operatives who serve it.
At its head sits Ahmad al-Sharaa as president of the republic, while his brother Maher, as secretary-general of the presidency, functions as the real executive command. His other brother, Hazem, presides over the Supreme Economic Council and shapes the shadow economy that now eclipses the formal one. Working beside them is Ibrahim Sukkarieh, or Abu Maryam al-Australi, the foreign-born operative who enforces settlements, negotiates asset transfers, and oversees the machinery of coercive economic restructuring.
Other relatives occupy strategic posts: the president's nephew, Owais al-Sharaa, whose precise mandate remains obscure; Ahmad al-Droubi, his brother-in-law who controls the Syrian Central Bank’s treasury; and Maher Marwan, another in-law installed as governor of Damascus. Even the president's brother, Jamal al-Sharaa, once part of this constellation, has been pushed aside after the president sealed his office in Damascus with red wax and barred official dealings with him.
Taken together, these placements amount to a consolidation of power unprecedented even under the Assad government: economic authority, administrative oversight, security influence, and financial liquidity concentrated in one family and the single trusted outsider who has become indispensable to its rule.
A state that exists on paper, and a network that governs in practice
Instead of moving toward an institutional recovery after the war, Syria has sunk deeper into a system of networked governance in which official bodies serve mainly as facades. Ministries still issue decrees, but the authority behind them is thin; committees stamp papers, yet the real decisions are made elsewhere. Power now moves through private channels and family networks, anchored in the shadow committee led by Hazem al-Sharaa and Abu Maryam al-Australi.
Foreign governments, investors, and Syrians themselves are confronted with a state whose outlines remain intact but whose operating core has been replaced by a small, intertwined network of family members, loyalists, and a foreign-born operative whose trajectory from militant-linked commentator to palace insider now defines the transition.
The unresolved question – for Syrians and outsiders alike – is simple: How does a country rebuild when its institutions are hollow, its economy is run through private networks, and its future depends on the decisions of individuals who operate above the state rather than within it?
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